UPDATED x2: Pres. Obama confirms my Feb. enrollment model: ACA Enrollments "Close to 4M" as of 2/19

Well this was unexpected...apparently at a fundraiser, President Obama gave a very rough update on the current ACA exchange tally:

President Obama said Thursday that "close to 4 million Americans" had signed up for insurance on the ObamaCare exchanges, a hint that enrollments may be accelerating as the deadline to purchase coverage nears....

"Right now, we've already got close to 4 million Americans who signed up for exchanges," Obama told a gathering of Democratic donors and governors at a luxury hotel just blocks from the White House.

Let's see how that jibes with my current February-vs-January rate projection.

At the moment, based on the still-limited data available, I'm showing an expected February total enrollment of around 866,000 people through March 1st:

President Obama's statement was yesterday (the 20th), which presumably means that the "close to 4M" number was based on data through the end of the day before (Feb. 19th).

The January HHS report has the official tally as of Feb. 1st down as exactly 3,299,492. Pres. Obama's data would include an additional 18 days. Since my 866K number includes 28 days, I have to use 64% of that (18/28). This would give about 557,000 enrollments added between 2/01 - 2/19, for a total of...3,856,409.

Does 3.86 Million count as "close to 4 million"? That depends on your perspective. Bear in mind that this wasn't an official report from HHS...in fact, it wasn't from HHS at all; it wasn't even a press conference or anything like that. It was just a quick line thrown out to a friendly crowd.

Given that context, I certainly think that 3.86 million would count as "close to 4 million".

Of course, my 866K projection could jump around quite a bit more as additional data comes in--remember how dramatically it jumped up when California released their mid-month data a few days ago. Still, I'm feeling pretty good about it at the moment.

And if I'm wrong, and it turns out that "close to 4 million" actually means that the true number is 100K more than I have projected (around 3.96M), I certainly wouldn't complain about that either!

UPDATE: OK, right after I posted this, Minnesota came out with a formal update which actually increases my model slightly (by a few thousand), which makes my point even stronger :)

In any event, I already had about 282,000 enrollements since 2/01 accounted for on the spreadsheet, so this means I can add another roughly 275,000 into the "Not Broken Out by State" field. Future updates which include new enrollment data from between 2/02 - 2/19 will be subtracted from this amount; enrollments from 2/20 on will be added to the total.

UPDATE x2: Maryland also just came out with another small update. Nothing major, but it continues to trend positively. The model now calls for about 869,000 total enrollments in February.